Few industries deal with as much paperwork and contracts as the finance industry. These agreements take a lot of work to create and manage, and getting them signed is often a real headache.
Thankfully, the advent of e-signature platforms and apps has helped enormously. These tools streamline the process of getting signatures and managing contracts.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the best e-signature solutions for the finance industry, the benefits they provide, how secure these types of platforms are, and more.
Leveraging E-Signature Solutions for the Finance Industry
There are numerous ways companies can utilize e-signatures in the financial industry. They’re great for collecting signatures on loan applications, finalizing credit card agreements, opening investment accounts, and even updating customer information over time.
Using an electronic signature app also helps with the account opening process in general, and is especially useful for quickly collecting multiple signatures when opening joint accounts.
Similarly, e-signatures are incredibly useful for mortgages that have multiple borrowers, as they make it much easier to secure all necessary signatures and details online, without requiring each person to come in and manually sign.
Many apps also make it easier and more efficient to manage and store your contracts. This is great for when you need to adjust terms, renew agreements, or even just locate some information.
Outside of dealing with customer contracts and documents, financial companies can also use an electronic signature solution internally to better handle onboarding new employees. Having new hires fill out contracts and documents electronically significantly speeds up the process and saves a substantial amount of paper.
Benefits of E-Signatures for Banking & Finance
Here’s a closer look at some of the benefits of using e-signatures in the banking and finance industry:
- Boost Efficiency: Using digital signatures helps streamline your contract and signing process. It reduces the amount of time and effort both you and your customer have to spend, and leads to faster account opening, loan approvals, and completed transactions. It reduces the need for many manual tasks like sending contracts through the mail, meeting with people in person, filing and storing documents, and more.
- Save Money: Companies that use e-signature solutions often end up saving money, too. You’ll no longer need to spend money to print, scan, and send paperwork, as everything is handled online. You also won’t need to waste money storing physical copies of your contracts, as many online platforms have a secure and searchable storage system in place.
- Improve Customer Service: Electronic signatures often enhance the customer experience, as they allow people to sign contracts online from the comfort of their home. This lets them open accounts faster, get loan funds sooner, and generally makes the entire process quicker and easier.
- Increase Security: Relying on digital signatures is often safer than other methods, as they have ways to verify the identity of the signer (such as digital certificates or biometric authentication) and are stored securely. They’re also generally encrypted and have a tamper-evident seal, so you’ll always know if the signature has been altered or changed.
- Reduce Errors: Data entry mistakes on paper contracts and documents are common and may lead to delays. Because many of the processes within gathering e-signatures are automated, there’s a lower chance of human error. Many eSignature platforms also include tracking to ensure documents aren’t accidentally lost or deleted.
Five Examples of E-Signature Solutions in the Finance Industry
Now that you know some of the ways the finance industry can use digital signature solutions and the benefits they provide, let’s go over some of the best options to consider using.
1. Signaturely
Signaturely is an incredibly simple electronic signature solution to streamline your contract signing process. It helps you create and prepare your financial documents as well as effortlessly send and track them. The platform makes it easy for your recipients to know what to fill out thanks to guided signing, and it offers seamless collaboration with your team.
It also digitally stores all of your contracts in one place, lets people sign documents remotely from any device, and has several useful integrations. Signaturely lets you create and use many types of electronic signatures, including typing your name, drawing a signature, or uploading a file.
You can even add your branding to documents with Signaturely, bulk-send contracts to numerous signees, import contact lists, and so much more.
Signaturely can support the contractual workflow of a wide variety of companies, but it’s especially well-suited for organizations seeking a straightforward, uncomplicated, and budget-friendly e-signature solution to enhance their customer experience.
2. Docusign
Docusign is a feature-rich platform that helps you manage all aspects of your agreements. You can use it to generate documents, create templates, build dynamic web forms, collect payments at the same time as signatures, and even notarize remotely.
The platform also offers multi-channel delivery (including via SMS and WhatsApp) and provides electronic signature verification for stronger authentication and security. It enables you to automate manual and repetitive tasks, and helps you transform the agreement data you receive into actionable insights that inform more informed business decisions.
Docusign is also relatively versatile, as it has a suite of applications aimed at helping everyone within your organization, including sales, IT, HR, legal, and procurement.
3. PandaDoc
PandaDoc is another option for the best electronic signature software. It’s an agreement management solution that lets you build tailored agreements using a simple and streamlined drag-and-drop editor.
You can collaborate with your team on the platform effortlessly, to ensure every document and contract gets multiple sets of eyes on it. Every document created and signed with PandaDoc has an audit trail, and the platform reports all user activity.
It offers widespread compliance, several security features in place to protect your data, and even allows you to embed payment gateways directly into your financial documents, enabling customers to make instant payments.
The tool also integrates with several customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and features numerous automation tools designed to reduce repetitive tasks, prevent errors, and eliminate time-consuming bottlenecks.
4. OneSpan Sign
OneSpan Sign is a full digital agreement solution that helps you create documents and forms, and gives you the option to add standard, advanced, and custom fields to each. It also offers both templates and layouts, which are great for organizations that frequently send similar documents with the same field requirements and format.
You can set up automated reminders and expirations to ensure your signers aren’t dragging their feet. This document signing software also prioritizes security, offering several authentication and identity verification options, including biometric authentication, knowledge-based authentication, ID verification, digital certificates, and more.
The platform helps you manage all of your documents and transactions by giving you a clear and intuitive dashboard and detailed reports, empowering you to see and control who has access to different documents.
5. Jotform Sign
Jotform Sign is an e-signature tool with a host of useful features to help you create and share contracts quickly and efficiently. It features an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, hundreds of templates, multiple sharing options, and advanced security features, including encryption, digital certificates, and widespread compliance.
It also helps you visualize data with live reports that update with every signature, and it works on mobile devices, computers, and tablets alike. The platform offers a range of field types to ensure you can collect more information than simply signatures, and you can set an expiration date on any document.
In addition to letting you easily sign a contract online and request signatures, the platform also makes it incredibly simple to send documents, as you can either copy and paste a link directly to it or embed it on your website.
Security Features of E-Signature Solutions for the Finance Industry
When you’re dealing with sensitive business documents and private financial data, security is understandably top-of-mind. Thankfully, most e-signature platforms take your security seriously and have several security features in place.
Firstly, they encrypt all documents and contracts to ensure there’s no unauthorized access to documents both during transmission and in storage. Many of these tools also verify signer identity through methods like biometric or multi-factor authentication.
There’s also a tamper-proof seal on many of these signatures and contracts, which alerts you if the document is altered, changed, or tampered with in some way. Most documents also feature an audit trail, which tracks the document’s history and records who has interacted with it.
To provide an extra layer of protection, these platforms often use role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure that only those who need access to perform their jobs can view your sensitive data, signatures, or contracts.
While these companies ensure that data is safe and encrypted during storage, many also undergo vulnerability scans and penetration tests to evaluate their preparedness in the event of a potential hack or attack, ensuring there are no weak points that criminals may be able to exploit.
Are E-Signatures for Finance Legal?
When it comes to the legality of electronic signatures, you’ll be happy to know that they’re completely lawful and legally binding. They hold the same weight as a wet signature for financial transactions and a wide range of other agreements.
In the U.S., this is thanks to the E-Sign Act, which is also known as the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act. It was signed on June 30th, 2000, declaring that e-signatures are legally recognized and legitimate when it comes to both interstate and foreign commerce. It essentially states that digital signatures cannot be denied simply for the fact that they’re digital.
While the electronic signature laws by state are fairly consistent, some states have slightly altered rules. However, e-signature for finance remains legal throughout the country. Similarly, many other countries around the world also have laws that legitimize e-signatures in finance and many other industries.
Signaturely is the Best eSignature Tool for Finance & Banking
Of all the above solutions, Signaturely is the best e-signature platform for the financial industry. It’s incredibly simple to use and easy to navigate, it helps you throughout the entire contract life cycle, and it offers seamless collaboration with others.
Whether you need your customers to sign a letter electronically, want to streamline the onboarding process, or wish to boost your signing efficiency, the tool can help. It also lets you access and manage all of your digital paperwork in one place, offers guided signing, and tracks your documents throughout their lifecycle.
In addition to these many valuable features, it’s also a budget-friendly platform suitable for small and large organizations alike.
If you want to try Signaturely before you commit to ensure it’s right for your organization, don’t hesitate to try the generous free trial.
FAQs About eSignature Solutions for Finance
Here are a few common questions about e-signature solutions for the finance industry, along with their answers.
Yes, many banks accept e-signatures for various financial transactions and agreements.
In the banking and financial industry, “e-sign” refers to the use of electronic signatures to sign documents, contracts, and agreements, rather than relying on physical paper signatures. It helps save time, reduce waste, boost efficiency, and provides several other benefits.
Yes, electronic signatures are legally binding and just as legitimate as wet signatures for accounts.
Final Thoughts About E-Signatures for the Finance Industry
Being able to collect electronic signatures in the finance industry helps speed up the entire contract process, reduces errors, enhances security, and saves money. Whether you use them for loan agreements, credit card applications, or even employee onboarding, they’re sure to save you a lot of time and effort.
